Luc Tuymans's Unsettling Portraits at Houston's Menil Collection

The Secretary of State, Luc Tuymans, 2005.
Image courtesy of the artist and the Museum of Modern Art

Luc Tuymans’s paintings are, in a word, disorienting. Controversial subjects—politicians and other cultural notables—are hidden behind a veil of banal details and spare color, innocuous upon first glance. The artist’s new solo show at Houston’s Menil Collection, “Nice. Luc Tuymans,” displays more than three decades of these works, many of which are modest in scale, as if to undermine the dark undercurrent running throughout.

Heritage VI, Luc Tuymans, 1996.
Image courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner, New York/London

The Belgian artist often begins with found material—film stills and photographs—and then reimagines the images as portraits rendered in pallid hues. In one painting, racist activist and Klansman Joseph Milteer smiles out from the canvas; in a portrait of Condoleezza Rice, the former secretary of state scowls pensively; another painting portrays a brooding Christ figure. But rather than imbuing his works with an obvious social critique, Tuymans demonstrates a skepticism about representation in portraiture. The washed-out palette and blurred shapes turn these personages into ghostlike images, mere fragments of a memory, and viewers are left to sift through abstracted and imprecise brushstrokes to discover what is exposed and what is concealed.